Konica Minolta DiMAGE A200 review

This is my first digicam so I can only compare it to my previous 35mm SLR.
It packs all the features I had before in a much smaller package, plus some extras like a flip-out screen. It's so much easier to carry around and use
The EVF is poor compare to the optical I was used to, but all digicams seem to be the same. The magnification to help focussing is still too blocky to be much use.
The screen is great, but it's not big enough to judge sharpness, particularly in a scene. You have to take the pic and trust the camera.
It gets exposure right all the time, and focus most of the time, but indoors it performs more slowly in arificial light and about 10% of the time the focus is off. Not by much, but enough to make a critical difference to a picture.
The camera seems biased towards a wide aperture, which doesn't help depth of field, and there's no landscape mode to correct this. You can use aperture priority but it takes time to set when you're trying to catch a candid shot.
Overall I'm pretty happy with the end results, especially the ability to crop without losing definition (thanks to 8m pixels).

Problems:

Big disappointment is movie mode. Indoors the lens hunts continuously, and every focus movement puts a series of clicks on the soundtrack. The mic is picking up the noise of the lens and it's very distracting! Manual focus gets rid of the clicks, and the screen shows the focus distance, but as I said above you can't really judge sharpness. It's hard to focus and zoom at the same time, when you should be able to just concentrate on your directing skills! I know this isn't a dedicated video camera, but my daughter's sub-£100 Kodak CX6330 can cope with scenes the Minolta can't. It's much better in bright sunlight though.